Sea Trinkets

I hadn't sat down at the torch to make any bead sets in quite some time. I got a custom order for a couple from one of my special customers and I got in that set "mode". So I did this additional set which is in my Etsy store. This is Silver Cinnamon, Silver Rattan, Dark Ivory, Nyx and Olympia Rain. A favorite color combination of mine.

Hummingbirds

I feel like I'm getting a whole lot of nothing done today so I thought I would post a cool picture. These are our four hummingbird feeders along the back of our house. Yes, they are this busy in the winter. In the summer it's usually two or three to a "flower".

Stamp Shows for 2009

I'm getting a lot of emails asking me about our show schedule for 2009. I guess I haven't made an official announcement yet so here it goes.....I'm staying home. I know that's not what you want to hear but I'm just tired of doing shows. Being away from home for 5 days at a time is hard and then there's catching up with all the work that's piled up while I was away. Traveling by yourself and hauling a booth around and setting it up after flying all day the day before....I could go on and on. It's exhausting. It really just comes down to this, life is too short to be away from the ones you love so I choose to stay home. Wally will be doing the San Jose show in February and we will both be at the Sacramento show this year and that's probably it. You can always find me right here though!

I got some wonderful emails today filled with artwork from Karen W of IL. I'll be posting them here over the next couple of weeks because I don't want to add anything to any of the galleries until I've "remodeled" them. This uses our Desert Mosque 526J & Resting Ride 653H. The palm frond and palm trees aren't Beeswax stamps, I think the frond is Stampscapes but we have a frond and tons of palm trees here. This is what Karen said she did to make the card:
These are both done with copic makers in the air compressor and Eclipse tape to mask and airbrush. I tore Eclipse tape top and bottom of areas and airbrushed a couple of browns and then a couple of blues and then stamped the images. Quick and easy!

Lost things found.

No...not the heat gun! But I have been doing a lot of searching for different items and I'm coming across some things that had been set aside and forgotten about, including this card by Vynette in Texas. This is our Birch 4240 and our Field Mouse 431AA along with an owl from Good Stamps Stamp Goods. We actually have a few owls that hang out on our property or very near and you can hear them calling to each other. I'd love to get a picture but they stay pretty high up in a tree and it's either dark already or near dark. Maybe a new camera is in order? We had actually wanted to get one of those night cameras that you mount on a tree. These have some type of motion sensor that takes a picture when triggered. Usually you get lots of pictures of cats! LOL!

Soap Bubbles

This is my favorite new thing to do with silver glass. The rubber stampers may know why I entitled this Soap Bubbles. This reminds me of the homemade marbled paper that you can make with soap, ink and a straw. I really didn't do much which is the trick here. The base is silver glass which is then dotted with Effetre Dark Ivory. The top bead has Peridot and the bottom is Taxco. I didn't reduce the glass at all, just melted it in and topped each dot with clear. That way you can see the crackle effect of the ivory from the silver in each dot. Way cool!

Art Fire

There's a new site for handmade goods called Art Fire and it's very much like Etsy. The biggest difference is that they only charge a flat monthly fee instead of listing fees and a percentage of each sale. If you get in on the ground floor, the monthly fee is only $7. That's crazy cool if this site takes off. I love Etsy but the lack of personal attention when you have a problem has been annoying. I'm not a big fan of automated messages. So then you run over to the forum on Etsy and ask your question hoping that an Admin will finally help you only to have one slap your hand for discussing a private issue in public and then they lock the thread. Uh...did you see that I had an important question? Guess not. So I opened an Art Fire shop last month and listed a few of my silver sliders and then promptly forgot about the site altogether....until someone flagged two of my items. The reason they gave Art Fire was "prohibited item" and "not handmade, this is a reseller". Huh? You are allowed to resell items there just like on Etsy as long as they are tagged correctly, which mine were. So I decided to email Art Fire and ask. Two hours later.....and I get a personal, non automated, non canned response back. I'm impressed:

Hi Amy,

I apologize for the scare. As long as you are in the Supplies/Vintage category, you may sell anything that artisans can use to make something handmade. Your items are fine. We’ve removed the flags and notified the flagger of the rules regarding the Supplies/Vintage category.

If you need anything else, please let me know.

Thanks!

Kirsten Van Detta

Director, Member Engagement

ArtFire.com

So I've decided to try and fill up my Art Fire store and give the site a more than fair chance. That $7 per month fee is only if you want to be a Verified seller too. If you'd like to just list up to 10 items a month it's entirely FREE! If you do sign up to be a Verified seller, I'd love it if you use me as a referral. The site is still in it's beta phase so things are changing and improving constantly but go on over and see how you like it! Especially if you are forking out lots of money each month to Etsy or Ebay.

Happy Kitties

Or should I say totally spoiled kitties? Auntie Susan sent the 'dorables some more handmade toys filled with catnip. They're supposed to share them with everyone else but since they have now been saturated with drool I'm not sure any of the other cats will want to go near them. Have you ever tried taking pictures of cats getting high on catnip? Not an easy feat. They don't seem to listen when you ask them to hold still for a photo.

Improvising

I actually did some stamping today! I needed to make some ATC's for a Valentines swap for RSC. I can't show you that because it would ruin the swap for anyone in it reading this. I'll show it in a couple of weeks. When I finished the ATC's I was still in the mood to do a little vintage stamping so I made this Valentine card. Goodness I'm in desparate need of some new craft supplies. My gold metallic pen that I wanted to use to edge the ivory paper with was dried out. I still can't find my heat gun so no embossing for me. I couldn't find any double stick tape either. I found five bottles of Elmer's glue (ick) and two glue sticks (not gonna work) so I had to improvise to put this card together. Good thing I was able to find my hole punch! A quick punch through each corner and then a metal fastener placed in and viola, done! I used the Mail Cupid 902L and Fancy Love 1031G and you can find both on this page of our website.

123

Are you old enough to remember the Jello dessert 123? It was a mix and you poured it into dessert glasses and it would separate into three different layers. I loved it as a kid because it was so cool. This bead reminded me of that dessert so I named it 123 Sea Pod. If you're a glass peep, this is the perfect example of how fickle silver glass can be because I used the same glass for all the dots. This is Psyche. I placed all the dots on, reduced and then started on the center row first and topped all the dots in that row with clear. The center row turned a gorgeous periwinkle with lots of lavender, even thought the dots look mostly blue in the photograph. While keeping the bead warm I lost reduction on the side rows so I reduced again and then did the row on the left that turned aqua. I then warmed the entire bead up and went straight to the other side without reducing again and topped that with clear and got a fabulous purple. 123!

It's Done! (kinda)

The website is up! I've finished all the main pages and uploaded it on Saturday. Everything seems to be in working order. I still have to convert the Gallery pages, Tips and Tricks and the POTM pages over to the new format but that will be done over a matter of a month or so. Here's what's different with the new site:

1. New color scheme that's easier on the eyes.
2. Streamlined navigation.
   
3. More division of some of the categories that had large pages.
4. Stamp sizes under each image.
   

I'd love to know what you think of the new site! Of course the other difference is that the blog is now here so it can be interactive. I'll be putting a link soon here too for the Chatterbox archives that cover 2005-2008.

Sharing

Unless we have a fire going, the DVR is the warmest place in the house. The 'dorables can be pretty good about trying to share it but it usually ends in a wrestling match for the best spot.

Happy New Year!

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The January project of the month is up and you can find it here. It's a cute little Valentine treat box done by Susan Quinn.